Wormholes
Wormholes are a scientific anomaly that were exploited as a form of transport by Professor Isaac Dahl in the early 22nd Century. As Technology The biggest scientific breakthrough for years, the ability to create wormholes allows instant access to any other point in the galaxy as they long as they remain stable. Opening a wormhole costs a tremendous amount of energy and sustaining them is just as costly. If a wormhole is created smaller than 23.3 meters wide, it is too small to be sustained and collapses on itself. If it is much bigger than that and it is not forcibly closed, then it could cause a permanent rip in space. As such, when they were first created in the early 22nd Century, they are created as small as possible. In theory they could be sustained at any size but in 2105 the biggest they can safely be created to is 24 meters. By 2114 it is 42.62 meters; by 2121 it is 103 meters. With the technology available to them the scientists could pin point the exact location they wish the wormhole exit to be. If the wormhole destabilises however then the exit point is out of their control and could be anywhere in space. Wormholes are never used in planetary atmospheres due to the risk of destabilising. Due to the amount of energy required to open a rip in space, wormhole generators are remarkably big and have to be stored in space stations. When new ships were developed to fight in the Theolosian Wars they began to be equipped with emergency wormhole generators to allow quick escape or emergency aid if they were caught off-guard. These wormholes would be of the minimum size and would not retain structural integrity for long. Hades Gate The first and most common form of wormhole created was a wormhole that is fuelled by only one generator. While this system does create a tear in space that can be sustained, due to exit side not being stabilised, the wormholes can fluctuate and sometimes collapse if strained. This first happened in 2114AD when ''The Orion ''was lost forever through a de-stable wormhole and led to Isaac Dahl's resignation from the scientific community. An uncredited scientist coined the wormholes as ''Hades Gates ''for all who entered could simply be exiting into hell. This form of wormhole travel began branded as dangerous and led to an increase in the research of warp drives, which became the most prominent form of galactic travel. Hades Construct Haunted by the lives that he had cost, Isaac Dahl left his position as head of the wormhole project and was press ganged into service as a politician. But nearly thirty years later he surprised the scientific community by developing the Hades Construct; a solution, he claimed, to the instability that caused the initial fluctuations when ''The Orion ''was lost. Dahl's idea was simple in principle, that if a wormhole could be connected on both sides of the tear, that it would not collapse and that it's size could be increased exponentially. The Hades Construct was first put into orbit around Gliese 581g , the planet that Dahl was Governor of and allowed instantaneous trade between the colony and Earth that benefited both planets greatly. The construction of this technology was incredibly expensive however and as such it took many years for other colonies to share this connection. While this slowed down trade between Earth and its other planets, it set Gliese as a staging post for further space exploration, with the initial jump from Earth to it's nearest colony cutting almost six months warp time from the travel.